


Continuing to Live

by lunabee34 (Lorraine)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen, Post Swan Song
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-08
Updated: 2013-06-08
Packaged: 2017-12-14 06:56:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/834023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorraine/pseuds/lunabee34
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coda for the season 5 finale, "Swan Song."  Poetry by Philip Larkin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Continuing to Live

_Continuing to live—that is, repeat_  
 _A habit formed to get necessaries—_  
 _Is nearly always losing, or going without._  
 _It varies._

Lisa’s no fool. She knows Dean has had her up on some kind of pedestal for years, made her into a symbol of everything he’s wanted but thought he could never have, and it’s pretty damn hard to live up to a guy’s fantasy of yourself. So when dinner’s kind of crappy, when she forgets to put the laundry in the dryer and everybody runs out of clean underwear, when they argue for the first time, Lisa holds her breath. She waits to fall. She waits for Dean to stop looking at her like she’s still unreachable, like she’s the perfect distant dream, but he never does. Lisa doesn’t know what that means.

Dean’s voice is different than she remembers—softer, more fragile, like he’s always on the edge of something. Lisa guesses he is; she knows where he lives now, where he‘ll probably always live—at the edge of a hole in the world watching his brother take a dive. Dean uses this new voice to tell her all the truths she didn’t think she’d be allowed to hear, and that surprises her. Dean’s never been very forthcoming about his life, his work, but every night after Ben is in bed, he pulls out his dad’s journal and tells her stories about wendigos and striga, ghosts and demons. Stories about Sam.

One night, Lisa wakes up, and the bed beside her is cold. She finds Dean in the kitchen with a row of guns laid before him on the table. He’s holding a pistol in his hand, rubbing down the barrel with an old dishtowel, and in the instant before he realizes Lisa is there, the expression on his face makes her think he’s about to do something terrible, something final, something she doesn’t want to name. Lisa closes her eyes, and when she opens them, he looks like her Dean again.

At that moment, Lisa realizes that Dean is covering over with words the things he leaves unsaid, the things that will always keep her on a shelf, unattainable, and keep Dean forever bleeding down into the dirt that swallowed his brother whole.

_This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise—_  
 _Ah, if the game were poker, yes,_  
 _You might discard them, draw a full house!_  
 _But it's chess._

Bobby never thought he’d be grateful to a damn demon, but he is. Crowley’s a son of a bitch, but he gave Bobby what nobody could, not even Cas when it comes down to it, and Bobby ain’t gonna be sorry he can walk again. He’s got a hell of a lot else to be sorry about without worrying on that.

Dean wanted out, pulled a bonafide Sam Winchester, and Bobby can’t blame him. If any two people ever bent over backwards for the universe more times than those boys, Bobby can’t say who. So he hugs Dean around the neck and he breaks some glass in the lot and when Rufus sends word of a rougarou, Bobby gets in his truck and drives.

Bobby sorta remembers being dead. It was only for a few minutes, but he’s got some hazy memories. Bizarrely, they involve Ash and Alfred Einstein; given what Sam and Dean told him about their stint in heaven, Bobby’s pretty sure his memories are the real deal.

Somewhere between the first and the fourth beer, Ash shook his hair back and punched Bobby in the shoulder. “Man,” he said, “you tried to cheat death almost as often as those motherfucking Winchesters. Are you really surprised that shit caught up with you?”

Bobby said no then, and he says it now. He says it when he burns Lorraine Provost’s bones and when he ganks a werewolf in Galveston and when Dean’s letters dwindle down to nothing at all. “No,” Bobby says. “That’s the job. But it don’t end just ‘cause you’re caught.”

_And once you have walked the length of your mind, what_  
 _You command is clear as a lading-list._  
 _Anything else must not, for you, be thought_  
 _To exist._

Heaven is exactly as Castiel remembers. The same bounds, the same expectations, the same everything. He’s disappointed.

Castiel was human for such a very short time, most of which was excruciatingly painful. And yet, he understands the draw; he knows why Sam and Dean have clung so desperately to what Uriel would have called their mewling, puling, pathetic weaknesses. On one of his good days. Humans possess a kind of grace, a goodness, a desperate hope that Castiel never felt until he was powerless.

Heaven is not the chaos he expected. It is not anarchy. Castiel finds no shambles. He’s not the sheriff, and he cannot be the soldier he was before. The cosmos is the same as ever; it turns about Castiel in the identical unending spin it began before he was made. Castiel rides the outer arms of the Milky Way, and he wonders why God decided that the marvels of Creation should only grip the hearts of those who can never touch them.

_And what's the profit? Only that, in time,_  
 _We half-identify the blind impress_  
 _All our behavings bear, may trace it home._  
 _But to confess,_

Sometimes Becky wonders how she’s supposed to go on living like everything is normal when Sam is in the ground and Dean is pretending like the last five years never happened and Chuck is just gone. She went to Chuck’s house after the world didn’t end and found a note on top of his keyboard, a document open on the monitor.

 _Dear Becky,_ the note said, _Perfect opportunity for a fix-it fic on page 293. I’m giving you the jump start on a coda; don’t disappoint the fans. <3 Chuck_

Becky wants to be pissed that he didn’t say goodbye or that he pushed her away in the first place—and he did push her away, no doubt about it—but she can’t. She’s seen this twist in the narrative arc coming for a while now; it’s not like the flashing arrows weren’t flashing or anything. It felt good while it lasted, though, pulling down the fourth wall with both hands, getting a peek at the Maker. But now Becky’s ankle deep in rubble, and it’s time to use what’s left to build something new.

She wipes her eyes and scrolls back to the beginning of Chuck’s manuscript, pen in hand. She’s got a story to write.

_On that green evening when our death begins,_  
 _Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,_  
 _Since it applied only to one man once,_  
 _And that one dying._

Dean looks good to Sam, washed over golden and warm in the frame of Lisa’s kitchen window. He smiles at the kid, smiles at Lisa, cleans his plate and asks for more pie while Sam watches. Dean looks unreal in that square of light, beautiful and strange, happier than Sam thinks he’s ever seen him. Sam’s heart hitches in his chest, and it hurts to breathe. He takes a step back further into the shadows so he doesn’t do something stupid like ring the doorbell.

Sam remembers everything. How can he not? Second verse, the same as the first, apparently, and if Sam knows how to do anything at all, it’s that old song and dance—brother pitted against brother, an absent jerk of a father, and running through all the distrust and the guilt and the anger, an absolute and irrevocable belief that family is what matters most. So, yeah, he and Dean have been playing that tune in microcosm for years. Part of Sam thinks it’s fucking hilarious that all it takes to stop the apocalypse is to lock down two brothers in a box long enough for them to get over themselves, and the rest of him just wants to throw up.

Behind the pane of glass, Dean ruffles the kid’s hair. He kisses a smear of meringue from the corner of Lisa’s mouth, and he stacks all the plates before dumping them in the sink. Sam watches Dean wash the dishes. He’s singing something; Sam can almost make out the song. The beat is so familiar. It’s on the tip of his tongue. Sam watches until every plate is washed, until Dean has wiped the kitchen table with a sponge and squirted the kid down with the sink nozzle. He waits until the house goes dark and the moon is high.

Then he walks, back into the night, down the bend in the road, over the hills and far away, and he doesn’t look behind him even once.


End file.
